VALITAR EPIC

What began as a dream for a show celebrating the power of man and beast ended as a spectacular failure

‘Valitar,” set in a fantasy kingdom of sleek stallions and acrobatic equestrians, was touted as a matchless spectacle.

Even before the Nov. 16 “world premiere” under a massive crimson tent at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, the Rancho Santa Fe producers were planning a 10-month, five city U.S. tour.

Mark and Tatyana Remley predicted a hit.

“It’s like Cirque du Soleil with horses,” Tatyana told a television reporter last fall, “but it’s its own type of show.”

What type of show was it? A disaster. “Valitar” only had a five-day run, the Remleys putting it down after its Nov. 20 performance. Insiders now say the real spectacle unfolded offstage — and will soon move center stage as lawsuits filed against the couple raise questions about the ill-fated show. The Remleys did not respond to several interview requests, but legal documents and people associated with “Valitar” describe a couple with lofty ambitions but limited abilities.

“They had no clue what they were doing.” said Erik Martonovich, “Valitar’s” original director. “They weren’t horse people and they weren’t show people.”

As the show took shape, former employees

say, the Remleys went from reckless spenders to penny pinchers. Vendors and employees have sued the couple for millions in unpaid salaries and bills. The corporation Mark had created to oversee “Valitar,” Equustria Development, has filed for bankruptcy.

Mark wrestled with the production’s ever-climbing costs, while Tatyana pursued her dreams of stardom. Ads for “Valitar” prominently featured the curvaceous blonde, despite her modest part in the show.

“She didn’t do any of the stunts,” said Roza Tabasa, the hospitality manager for “Valitar,” who saw one of the few performances. “But in the end, when the whole cast lined up and everybody is applauding, this blonde lady comes down the center, the other cast members part for her — and there’s silence.

“People are thinking, ‘Who’s she? Oh, it’s the lady in the poster.’ ”

‘Gladiator’

To hear Tatyana tell it, she created “Valitar” on a whim. In late 2011, she maintained during a TV interview, she confessed a “lifelong dream” to her new husband.

“Sit down, honey,” she recalled saying to Mark. “It’s crazy — are you ready? Let’s start a show and call it ‘Valitar.’ ”

But in another version of this production’s birth, the Remleys began with an even bolder vision: They would create a show to rival “Cavalia,” the horse-and-acrobatics show created by a Cirque du Soleil founder.

This is the tale told by Martonovich, a competitive rider, founder of Las Vegas’ Big Horse Productions and former “Cavalia” cast member. The Remleys contacted him in January 2012, asking if he’d help mount a production like “Cavalia.”

“But I believe they said they wanted to make their show ‘hotter,’ with fire,” the Vegas horseman said.

Face-to-face in Nevada, then via phone and email from California, they talked cost (for a “Cavalia”-level show, $10 million or more). They talked acts (Martonovich is a “vaulter,” someone who performs gymnastics on horseback). They talked show titles.

“Gladiator,” the show Martonovich wrote with Caesar’s Palace in mind, would work but would need a name with fewer Roman echoes. With a friend, Martonovich experimented with variations on the Latin word for “mighty,” validus.

The show became “Valitar,” and Martonovich became the director. The job came with enormous pressures; the premiere was less than 10 months away. Still, he was eager to start.

Then he got a text message. The Remleys were divorcing, Mark texted, but wanted to proceed with “Valitar.”

“Is that OK with you?” he asked.

Promised a $100,000 salary plus 20 percent ownership in the show, the director swallowed his misgivings.

Target: ‘Cavalia’

To keep “Valitar” on schedule and on budget, Martonovich called in favors with performers, costume designers, horse owners — many veterans of “Cavalia,” a show the Remleys continued to target. Both “Valitar” and “Cavalia” planned to play San Diego in November, but Team V persuaded the fairgrounds to book the new show instead of the seasoned “Cavalia,” which is based in Quebec. (“We did this pro-America, ‘you-should-go-with-us’ thing,” Martonovich said. “Obviously, that turned out bad for them.”) When “Cavalia” opened in San Jose last summer, the Remleys dispatched their operations manager to the Bay Area to report on the latest acts.

“It was basically like a spy mission,” Kimball Keller said.

To keep pace with “Cavalia,” though, would require stables full of talent and cash. Outsiders guessed that Mark had enough of the latter to buy the former.

“He seemed like a guy with a lot of money,” said Cheryl Erpelding, publisher of California Riding Magazine. “A wheeler-dealer who had these crazy ideas that he could pull off this show.”

“He was someone who had a full wallet — who wanted everything,” said hospitality manager Tabasa, another hire with “Cavalia” experience. “And the show did have the potential to be successful.”

The Remleys, former associates said, hungered for a top-flight show. They spent roughly $3 million on the 45,000-square-foot tent, a towering landmark visible from Interstate 5. They budgeted $250,000 for horses and even more for a lavish “VIP Lounge.”

But as horses and performers rehearsed in a dusty Otay Mesa field last summer, there were signs of financial distress.

One day, Keller found a “Valitar” horse writhing in pain from colic. He called in a vet, who warned the steed could die if it wasn’t immediately transported to the emergency room — a journey that would cost at least $1,500.

Mark balked. Keller exploded.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked. “Here this guy has millions of dollars and he doesn’t want to spend $1,500 to save a horse?”

Keller won that argument, but he and others continued to question the Remleys’ financial priorities.

“Eventually,” Tabasa said, “you could see that they were spending money carelessly.”

Case in point: a midsummer shopping trip Tatyana and Keller took to Mary’s Feed & Tack. “She bought halters and rakes and wheelbarrows — everything we didn’t need, we already had this stuff,” he said.

Another time, Keller noted that his contract included a car. Tatyana gave him her used truck, then used Mark’s money to buy a new, fully loaded GMC.

Weeks before the show opened, though, the Remleys’ free-spending ways ended. So did their checks to vendors and employees.

“There was this constant frenzy,” said Tiffani Baumgart, who had been hired to furnish the concessions tent and the VIP lounge. Tatyana, Baumgart noted, would set last-minute deadlines on her order — then add new items without allowing more time. “And then,” Baumgart said, “they were stalling on their payments.”

Keller’s take: “He wanted a lobster show on a peanut butter budget. His eyes were bigger than his checkbook.”

Stealing Zeus

Mark Remley is no Warren Buffett, but he is wealthy. When his family’s Internet technology company was sold in 2002, he received $26 million. Last June, he reported $377,316 in his checking account, $7.6 million in securities, and $8.2 million worth of real estate, jewels, horses and other property.

Still, was he really rich enough to mount a $10 million show?

Last spring, after Mark and Tatyana separated, he reported monthly income of $28,600. That wasn’t much more than his monthly expenses: nearly $26,000, including $7,800 in child support for four children he had before marrying Tatyana.

Mark, now 46, had married Elizabeth “Joy” Henry in 2001. Theirs was a stormy union, marked by separations, reconciliations and horses — a pattern that would be repeated in his second marriage.

Less than 14 months after divorcing Joy, Mark married another horsewoman, Tatyana Woolcott, then 30 and an occasional San Diego Polo Club player.

This was Tatyana’s second marriage, too. Her 11-month marriage to Kenneth Woolcott, a lawyer and entrepreneur who had made millions in biotech, had resulted in a son — and a long custody battle.

To subsidize this fight, Tatyana maxed out four credit cards, running up balances of $59,000, and borrowed another $65,000 from her new husband.

So when Mark and Tatyana separated last spring, both needed cash for expenses — including “Valitar’s” expanding staff, which would grow to 90 people and 45 horses. Mark secured a $2.2 million line of credit and sold two of his six houses; a five-bedroom, three-bath place in Alexandria, Va., for $305,000, and a four-bedroom, 3½ bath in Del Mar for $2.9 million.

Tatyana, too, acted to bolster her finances. During their estrangement, Mark maintained in court, she stole and tried to sell four of his horses. For the most impressive specimen, a sleek, broad-chested black Friesian named Zeus, she wanted $18,000.

Then last summer, the couple reconciled. Suddenly, Tatyana wanted a larger role in “Valitar.”

She had ridden ponies since her childhood in North County and had played a bit at the San Diego Polo Club. Unlike other cast members, though, she was not a professional rider. When Tatyana demanded more time on stage, director Martonovich refused.

“She wasn’t an acrobat,” he said, “wasn’t a dancer, just didn’t have the skill sets.”

She used her contacts at polo club, though, leaning on them to arrange a promotional “Valitar” demonstration after the polo season’s final chukker in September.

As Tatyana trotted onto the field, the audience was impressed by the muscular black steed, the aforementioned (and unsold) Zeus. Horse and rider completed ovals, figure eights and then — nothing. No tricks, no stunts. The audience waited for something to happen, then responded with polite applause.

That same month, while practicing a demanding chariot act in Otay Mesa, a horse broke his leg.

The animal was destroyed; Martonovich was fired.

He believes other, more personal factors, led to his dismissal: “I’m pretty sure at that point, it was about Tatyana. She didn’t want me around because I didn’t want her.”

When they heard that Martonovich had been axed, about 18 of the 25 performers left the show. And the Remleys could no longer use acts owned by Martonovich and his Big Horse Productions.

The couple hired Sylvia Zerbini, another ex-“Cavalia” performer and horse trainer. She had two months to rewrite the show, hire more performers, finish rehearsals and move the show to the fairgrounds — by mid-November.

Because that’s when “Cavalia” would hit San Diego.

In the flashlight’s beam

In the tightknit horse community, some doubted that the Remleys’ show could dethrone its rival.

“It seems a little crazy to go up against ‘Cavalia,’ which has been doing it a long time,” said Erpelding, California Riding’s publisher. “There’s only so much disposable income that people are going to spend on horse shows.

“And if you are going to see just one, which one would you see?”

But the Remleys’ strategy was for “Valitar” to match “Cavalia’s” buzz and ticket sales in San Diego. Both shows scheduled local runs from mid-November through Jan. 6. Then “Cavalia” would go abroad.

Thus, Tabasa said, “ ‘Valitar’ would have the run of the United States.”

“Valitar,” though, opened to reviews comparing it unfavorably to its rival, playing just 23 miles away.

“ ‘Cavalia,’ ” U-T San Diego critic Pam Kragen wrote, “feels like what ‘Valitar’ could be when it grows up.”

The show’s first weekend ended without sellout crowds packing the 2,200-seat tent. Still, the show’s ticketing manager — a former Ticketmaster and Live Nation employee — saw no reason to panic.

“I think they expected more,” Christine Lawrence said of her former employers. “Being new to the business, never having done entertainment, I think they didn’t know what to expect.

“You have to build up the clientele.”

That clientele only had a short time to find “Valitar.” Six days into the show’s run — the day before Thanksgiving — Lawrence came to work to find that the Remleys had closed the show.

“I was as surprised as anybody else when I came in that morning,” she said. “I hadn’t been paid for three weeks.”

“Valitar’s” crew was paid every two weeks, but the checks stopped in November. The Remleys also canceled contracts they had with Imperial Beach landlords and the Del Mar Hilton, where some employees were housed.

Fearing the worst, Tabasa hurried back to the Hilton. Her passkey no longer worked.

“Mark had closed out our rooms overnight,” she said, “while we were sleeping.”

Horses and riders were stranded, their plans of a national tour — and almost a year’s employment — shattered. Vendors such as Baumgart, the interior designer, hurried to the fairgrounds, laboring around the clock and — because the Remleys had canceled the utilities — in the dark.

Working by flashlight, Baumgart and her team hauled away two 16-foot alderwood bars, made for the VIP Lounge at a cost of $22,000 each; a fountain; chandeliers; life-size carved horse’s heads; velvet and velour canopies; parquet flooring and furlongs of faux stone walls.

None of it paid for. “I have $250,000 in outstanding invoices,” Baumgart said.

And then there’s the tent, once the proud emblem of what was planned as an ambitious spectacle. Now behind a padlocked fence, it is a red reminder of a spectacular failure, one that may rank among San Diego’s worst entertainment disasters.

On Jan. 29, that tent will be auctioned off.

On Feb. 19, Equustria’s creditors — the fairgrounds, a stall manufacturer, a graphics designer and others — will meet in bankruptcy court.

And on March 6, “Cavalia” will open in Brisbane, the first stop in its three-city, five-month swing through Australia.